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NASA's Curiosity rover lands on Mars

PASADENA, Calif. -- As NASA celebrates arguably one of the greatest engineering achievements in the history of robotic planetary exploration, the United States' car-size Curiosity rover now stands poised to start soon on its next great journey. It will be a journey of exploration as integral to NASA's mission as the journey that got the rover to the Red Planet. "At this point, as scientists, we haven't even really scratched the surface, and really, what's amazing about it, is the miracle of this engineering," NASA project scientist John Grotzinger said Monday after the rover settled onto the Martian surface. Curiosity, which began its trip with a Thanksgiving weekend launch from Florida's Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, now sits at the bottom of a 100-mile-wide crater just 6 miles from a mountain taller than Washington's Mount Rainier.